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Still watching The Walking Dead? Much like the animated corpses that haunt its episodes, AMC’s long-running zombie series, once a compelling blend of gore and back-to-basics, push-people-to-their-limits drama, lost its vitality a while back. Regulars who once had believable, nuanced journeys (such as Melissa McBride’s Carol) were pushed into ever-more-pointless circles.

Both seasons seven (2016-2017) and eight (2017-2018) felt self-importantly inflated, and a charismatic villain (Jeffrey Dean Morgan’s Negan) was over-used, his menace inevitably wearing thin. Powerful episodes and sequences were buried among the bloat, and, time and time again, sombre (which the show...